Comment: Culture, Rigor, and Science in Educational Research

In this article the authors argue that both the Feuer, Towne, and Shavelson article and the larger National Research Council (NRC) report on which it is based must be understood in the context of current federal discourse that focuses narrowly on experimentally derived causal explanations of educational program effectiveness. Although the authors concur with much of the Feuer et al. article and the NRC report, they are concerned that the NRC committee, by accepting uncritically its charge to define the scientific in educational research, produced a statement that risks being read as endorsing both the possibility and the desirability of taking an evidence-based social engineering approach to educational improvement nationwide. Finally, the authors review the consequences of not challenging the layperson’s “white coat” notion of science and replacing it with a more complicated and realistic view of what actual scientists do and the varied and complex methods and perspectives they employ in their inquiry.